It's 2026 — what should a developer do with a new Mac? • Lucky Snail

Happy New Year, everyone! I’m luckySnail, wishing my readers a swift success and instant wealth in the new year. If you’re a fellow programmer like me, may our “code” power be fully unleashed. Now, let me share how I recently set up a new Mac in under half an hour. If you’ve just got a new computer—Mac or Windows—you can follow my configuration approach.

Connect to the Internet + Install Claude Code

The first step is obviously to connect to the internet, then move on—nothing special there. Then go to https://claude.com/product/claude-code and use curl to install Claude Code (CC). After installation, if you run claude, you’ll likely see: zsh: command not found: claude. At that point, you need to run one more command to configure the environment variables so that any CLI tools installed later can be invoked directly:

# Add these lines to your `~/.zprofile` (or `.zshrc`)

# Common user binaries
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:/opt/homebrew/bin:/opt/homebrew/sbin:$PATH"
# Then run source ./.zshrc

This way, tools like brew, npm, bun, etc., installed later will be immediately available! Once CC is installed, everything becomes extremely simple.

GUI App Installation

Open CC and tell it the apps you want to install—let it use brew to do the work. You just wait for it to finish and enjoy the results. Here’s my app list:

brew install --cask tencent-meeting feishu wechat wetype neteasemusic google-chrome wpsoffice doubao iterm2 typeless microsoft-edge capcut visual-studio-code webstorm cleanshot sourcetree picgo obsidian

If you know the full list you need, you can run a single command. If not, let CC figure it out.

CLI

Same as installing GUI apps—you can either chat with CC or run a command:

brew install ffmpeg gh git tree wget fnm

Terminal Beautification

Tell Claude:

Install terminal beautification tool: https://ohmyz.sh/ , use theme: powerlevel10k, and install plugins: zsh-syntax-highlighting zsh-autosuggestions

Conclusion

In the past, setting up a new computer took at least an hour. But with AI, I highly recommend installing an AI CLI Agent first, then handing everything else over to it. It’s not only fast but also does a great job. Environment setup and terminal tinkering have become incredibly easy in the AI era.